Touch and go

How Powderfinger rode out success and why they've returned to their roots. By Bernard Zuel.

Above Brisbane's nightlife strip of Fortitude Valley, tucked away down a small lane, sits the Tivoli nightclub. It was the folk music heart of the city before rock bands discovered its charms.

From the outside, except for wrought iron gates that seem to recede into shadow even in the mid-afternoon, this two-level room hardly blares its presence.

But inside, with its mix of art deco styling and timber beams, faux marble pillars and photos of 1930s shop assistants, you could say the Tivoli's two sides are much like the way Brisbane mixes the upfront attitudes of any big city with the scale and relative warmth of a mid-size town.

It's one reason Powderfinger, the biggest band in the country for the past four or five years, haven't felt any need to move away from Brisbane. It's also one reason they launched their fifth album, Vulture Street, at the Tivoli. Like the band itself, the Tivoli is big and simultaneously small, bold and simultaneously understated.

Although they took their name from a powerful Neil Young song, began playing hard-edged, almost metal songs and some of them wore their hair almost long enough to brush their dole-assisted backsides, Powderfinger have been battling a mixed blessing in recent years.");document.write("

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They had become the ballad blokes, the only Australian rock band that could do soft, sensitive songs about heartache and love without turning into fellow Brisbanites Savage Garden. Pick You Up, My Happiness, The Day You Come, My Kind of Scene - and there were more - put singer Bernard Fanning's high tenor against meaty but held-back backing and wrapped it all in melodies that could almost croon.

It sold to boys and girls, mums and dads, 2UE listeners as well as Triple J listeners - even if some of those buying got a bit of a shock when they turned up to a Powderfinger show and found the volume high and an often triple guitar-led attack capable of heaving more than pop chart pebbles.

So there was one conflict: could they keep going with the hearts-on-the-sleeves stuff - after all, they were good at it and it sold bucketloads - or was it time to move on?

While exploring their ability to play both hard and soft, the size of their venues expanded and sales for each album kept growing. From three times platinum (more than 210,000 copies) for their second album, Double Allergic, to five times platinum for Odyssey Number Five.

Simultaneously, expectations within and outside the band of finally making some inroads overseas, particularly in the US, sent them on long tours. They played to thousands in some towns, handfuls in others, but always got back on the bus and headed to another town, another country. By the end of 2001 they had spent nearly two years on the road.

All now in their 30s and financially secure for the first time in their lives, they were talking to each other still but were close enough to being sick of the sight of each other for it to scare them.

Hence conflict No. 2: Was it possible to be both a contender in world markets and sane, balanced adults?

The choice they made was for sanity over sales.

"We went through a tough period because we were touring so much," says drummer Jon Coghill. "We wanted to have more fun and enjoy that we were a band, rather than chase what you're supposed to do. We thought it was better to be friends than [worry about] what amount of success was involved."

The 32-year-old surfer-tanned Coghill is the joker of the band, the small-framed blokey but not ocker one, who has always looked the most extroverted.

"Ten years ago we were probably more like we are now. Then it was about going out, having a good time, being stupid, then it got serious for a few years before coming full circle. We didn't have anything at the start - we were all on the dole - and we got caught up in trying to do well.

"We're all really ambitious people, but I think our ambition is a subconscious thing and we got caught up in that and lost it a bit."

"We did reassess and thought, this is a major part of our lives, but it's not the only thing - we've got partners, normal lives," he says. "We had a break at the beginning of last year, three months, and Bernard had the tragic loss of his brother, Darren had a kid, and we had a lot of time to reflect. We all found that this is really important to us, but we wanted to make it more fun."

Pointing out that after an initially fraught period when the style for this album was being thrashed out and friendships have firmed rather than frayed, Haug believes change had to come.

"If we'd done Odyssey Number Six I think people would have been sick of us really quickly," he says. "I would have been bored with it. This is more fun: we can rock out, have a fun time, laugh on stage. It's less heavy-hearted."

Laughing on stage? Powderfinger? It's hard to believe at first, and not just because of those ballads and Bernard Fanning's strongly worded, politically aware lyrics that have lacerated the Howard Government's handling of refugees, racism and social policies.

It's hard to believe the laughter because this is the band whose management has always micro-managed their affairs to such painful levels that humour was squeezed out, along with the unexpected and the uncontrollable. The same band who seemed so caught up in trying to prove they were just ordinary blokes on stage that they forgot they were on stage for a reason: they weren't ordinary blokes.

Powderfinger, like many a local act in the '90s, fell victim to the Australian fear of being considered a big-noter, a poser. While English bands made strutting showmanship an automatic part of their repertoire and American bands adopted slick confidence, Australians seemingly disappeared into the backdrop.

It didn't always matter at home where, even if the show aspect was small, the fans were loyal and the musicianship of good quality. But overseas, the low-key performances, on and off stage, were the last thing they needed when they were trying to be heard above the din of hundreds or even thousands of other acts.

After their extended round of touring two years ago, the quintet found itself confronting what guitarist Darren Middleton calls an "obvious in hindsight" truth: they needed to do more than just be good players.

As Haug says: "If you do that many gigs in that many environments, you have to do something other than gaze at your shoes or people will turn their back on you. I love the rock star, the Marilyn Manson and [German pyrotechnic metal band] Rammstein, but I don't think it's in our nature. If we did something like that people would see right through us, because they know that's not us. We want to be the kind of band you can feel the excitement coming off."

Sure, there was never going to be exploding drums or a mini-Stonehenge a la Spinal Tap, but the change in attitude meant a relaxed band and a relaxed band began to have fun.

"Three years ago we thought, 'we are meant to be entertainers, [to] put on a show for people,'" says the 32-year-old Middleton. "You go to see some theatre or a band and you've paid your money and don't want to see yourself or the guy next door doing it, you want to be taken out of your own existence for an hour and a half.

"We sat down and thought, we've got to make this special. For that hour-and-a-half be egotistical, let your passions run wild and then when you're off the stage you don't have to live that life, you can come back to normality."

While the others could ramp up the theatrics a bit, it's still true that the refashioning of Powderfinger on stage would come down to one man more than any other: the singer. Luckily, by the time Powderfinger finished that last tour, Bernard Fanning was ready.

At 33, Fanning is still boyishly slight but loose-limbed and lithe. He's not obviously good-looking, is almost permanently carrying a two-day growth and the fine straight hair that falls either side of his face frames it but obscures his features, too. Yet he has an undeniable charisma.

Where once he would almost hide on stage, clutching the microphone stand protectively, now he strides confidently while never seeming above the fray. It's a delicate and under-appreciated skill. Similarly, off stage, while he alternates between lounging in his chair, relaxed and jocular, and unconsciously tapping his fingers or legs when slightly agitated, he remains both physically and socially engaged.

He may not like the parade of promotion and analysis that is the publicity schedule but he's not running away from it any more.

The on-stage confidence had already been seeping through in Fanning's lyrics. Odyssey Number Five had seen him strip away several layers of parable to leave songs much less ambiguous. What was evident then and is now clear on Vulture Street is how far Fanning is from the empty, angry mumblings of many of today's most popular lyricists.

For him, a man quick to anger when roused but just as quick to move on, that anger is merely a tool not the whole response, even to something that both depresses and fires him up, the treatment of refugees. And that holds true to more complex romantic emotions.

"I've had that great Australian fear that my mates are going to give me shit," Fanning confesses. "I now understand it's all right to talk about love and that sort of stuff. So now I'm much more comfortable saying things in songs and much less precious. I've learnt to trust myself more."

And to let something like the death of his brother from cancer in February last year emerge in his songs.

"I wrote a lot of songs while he was sick and just after he died, none of which are on this album, that directly related to it because I needed to do it," he says. "That's the main way that I express myself, my hidden feelings, and it was part of the grieving process for me.

"I did a gig in Melbourne last year, a refugee benefit, that was only six weeks after my brother died, so it was pretty raw still and there's a bootleg now with a lot of those songs on it. I contacted one of the [bootleggers] and asked if they could send me a copy and it sounds great, but it's pretty depressing."

He wouldn't consider those songs for the band?

"They were the wrong kind of songs. They weren't rock songs, they were acoustic ballads and a couple of real soul ballads, really mellow things."

Ah yes, the rock song versus ballad conundrum. With advance word of Vulture Street's tougher sound emerging before the album's release this week, they were already being heckled by some for apparently jumping on the rock revival bandwagon.

But what was driving the urge to construct an album with more direct, almost assaulting, guitars was the need to remind themselves why they got into this business in the first place.

As bassist John Collins explains: "We've all come from rock'n'roll, that's how we started, so when you're on the road for a year-and-a-half playing the songs from Odyssey Number Five you think 'I wish we had some solid rock songs to play'.

"I know that there's a rock fashion again, but it's always been in fashion for us. Odyssey Number Five was what we thought we were good at so we tried to cement what we were good at in one record. This time we thought, let's have fun. Maybe it won't have the same shelf-life but it's more exciting."

And, as Coghill points out, that sense of fun is one clear difference between the driven rock of Powderfinger and the angst-ridden hard rock scene of Korn, Limp Bizkit and their ilk.

"People seem to think that you have to be full of angst or struggling to do rock'n'roll," Coghill says. "But look at the '70s with Led Zeppelin and the Stones: they rocked the hell out of people. It was more about having fun than all this angst. I think it's been confused these days."

So Powderfinger are a fun band? It's true, these days turned out nothing like we had planned.